How CRM Gamification Can Drive Your Agents to Excel

Everyone understands the importance of adequately motivating sales agents. Motivational activities however, such as sales competitions, usually reward the end game of winning more deals instead of the adoption behaviors and processes that will help your agents get there. This is where CRM gamification is especially valuable. With the right setup, gamification can be a great tool for sales and service operations, helping managers with anything from focusing agents on the right prospects to improving data hygiene and process adoption. Here’s how it works:

Let’s start with definitions

gamification does not mean team building activities such as playing beer pong or phantasy football in the office. What it does mean is using mechanisms from the world of gaming to promote behaviors and engagement with work related activities. Game mechanics can include narratives, challenges, prizes, accumulated points, status symbols and more. When gamifying a CRM, we infuse these elements into different activities and areas in our CRM and trigger them based on our employees behavioral and activity data. When done right, gamification taps employees’ intrinsic motivations, automatically giving feedback and nudging agents towards certain behaviors, so that we can affect the process and not just react to the result. Let’s look at some examples.

Rewarding non-intuitively rewarding processes

While closing deals wins you bonuses, no-one will ever give you a slap on the back for properly filling in fields before converting a lead into a contact. Now, imagine that you got bonus points every time you converted a lead properly. Every time you do this well you gain more points and every time you try to convert without filling out all the required fields you lose points. At the end of the month you can convert these points for prizes of your choice so there’s actual value to be won or lost. After working this way for a while, employees start to naturally work the right way and you get the benefit of cleaner sales data which drives insights and agents who can intelligibly review customer data when they need to.

Nudge Employees in the right direction

It’s common knowledge that it takes between 5 and 8 attempts on average before a sales development rep can set a meeting with a prospect. Unfortunately, most sales development reps won’t try to connect with a prospect more than 2 to 3 times. Let’s say that we created a goal for agents to log at least 5 contact attempts with a lead before deciding its lost. Using the data from the CRM we can keep a life bar on top of the rep’s screen constantly showing them how many attempts they make on average. If an agent gets to the red zone (i.e. an average of under 5 attempts) we challenge them to do better and send them encouraging notifications. If an agent has a great record on the other hand, and their life bar is always at the top of the green (i.e. 8 attempts) we give them a “Tenacious D” badge and post their picture with rock star music on the sales team TV. Here, we use gamification to drive behaviors that will result in better results.

Celebrating small wins

There are several stages in the sales process before signing the contract. In long cycle deals it’s imperative to keep momentum and motivate agents to endure and follow up. You do this by celebrating small wins such as scoring a meeting with the decision maker, getting a signed LOI or passing a technical evaluation. With gamification you can celebrate milestones in the deal process with kudos, badges and notifications. You can even set a structure where bonus points are gained when finishing each stage of the deal, and high scores are noted and recognized, thus directing agents to go through a structured sales process.

Motivate learning

A large part of being successful in sales is understanding your product and clients. During their day to day drudge, sales agents have little time or patience for learning. This is where we can tap gamification to deliver a learning challenge based on CRM data. For example, on the date of a scheduled task to call a client, we could offer a quiz challenge on the agent’s knowledge of the clients data or set a quick trivia game about the product this call is about.

What is this good for?

Our CRM serves as the sales organization’s random-access memory. A healthy company, with a large client base and plenty of prospects, should be able to use it to quickly get up to speed on different deals, direct sales activities and allow managers to get data driven insights. To do this, organizations require employees to meticulously log data, follow processes and stay on top of their game. In this article we’ve provided several examples on how gamification can help you achieve this.

To learn more and see if CRM gamification can be right for you, click here to set a free consultative meeting with one of our gamification experts.